Sunday, 19 February 2017

Full
Disclosure: I backed this film’s Kickstarter. I have buyer’s remorse. Also,
spoilers.

Mai
Mai Miracle wants you to feel things, other than boredom.Great animation veils undercooked characters and an unfocussed plot. Unfortunately, the film is otherwise so competent, that no dunderheaded artistic choice will distract you from how much of a slog the film
is.

In 1950s Japan, there forms an unlikely
friendship between an outgoing, rural tomboy and a shy, city girl. Our tomboy, Shinko,
has a vivid imagination. She transforms the countryside into the ancient Land
of Suo’s capital. She dreams of a lonely princess, who wants only to meet a
girl her age. Our shy girl, Kiiko, can’t quite grasp Shinko’s fantasies, but
reaches out to them regardless. Our heroines, alongside four boys, adventure
through the countryside, until one of the boys has his life changed forever.

Friendship. Friendship between rich and
poor, urban and country, refined and unrestrained, friendship across a gulf of
circumstance and personality, a gulf which narrows as friendship grows – a fine
sentiment. But a movie cannot live on only a sentiment.

Films require conflict. (Some avant-garde films
forgo conflict, but Mai Mai Miracle
is not avant-garde.) If there is no difference between how the world is and how
characters wish it would be, why should the audience care about what characters
do? What are their doings for? Lacking a conflict, their actions only add to
runtime, not plot. A long, continuous portion of this film amounts to a montage
of children playing. Cute, for the first thirty seconds, but soon we beg the
film to go somewhere.

Mai
Mai Miracle could do with a lot more conflict
spread throughout, rather than front- and back-loading it. The first twenty
minutes have a bit of conflict: transfer student Kiiko is treated as an
outsider, and wants to stop feeling isolated. A conventional conflict, but the
film goes through the motions convincingly.

Problem is, the conflict resolves too
quickly. The gregarious Shinko follows Kiiko home. Soon Kiiko warms to her. And
then there are no new challenges, no new gulfs between reality and desire,
until a good thirty minutes later. Oh, yes, stuff happens within that thirty
minutes. They make new friends and go adventuring, but no obstacle stands in
the way of getting friends, nor did the adventures throw up any obstacle. (It
does throw up one bit of conflict, when a child goes missing, but it resolves
without our heroes’ input.) Lulls in action are fine, but one-third of a movie
is a hiatus.

This lulling period-piece of children
playing in untamed nature feels like watching someone else’s nostalgia. For the
first ten minutes, it is merely mawkish. By minute forty, it is interminable. It
may mean a lot to the author of the original book, but their childhood arcadia
bores me to tears.

Some conflict still runs through this
section’s still waters, but of such a kind that it doesn’t matter. Shinko
imagines an ancient princess, in desperate want of a friend. The viewer infers
this potential friend is the peasant girl on the other side of the castle wall.
The princess wants a friend, does not have a friend, and a way presents itself
of getting a friend – thus conflict. But even putting aside the easy resolution
this conflict has, it is unsatisfying. Within the narrative, it is a fantasy,
i.e. not real. Why should I care if this imaginary girl doesn’t get a friend?

I suppose, the purpose of this fantasy’s
conflict is subtext. After a dream where the princess is lonely, the normally
unflappable Shinko wakes up crying. At the end of the film (spoilers), Kiiko
continues Shinko’s fantasy in her mind. The princess only befriends the peasant
girl in Kiiko’s fantasy. It symbolises the solidification of Shinko and Kiiko’s
relationship. Despite her boundless imagination, Shinko cannot imagine the
princess with a friend. Only when Shinko’s friend Kiiko opens her mind to
Shinko’s fantasies can Kiiko give the princess a friend.

But while I’m all for subtext, it should
relate to the actual text. The princess and the peasant girl become friends.
That would be a fitting metaphor for the film’s first act, when rich girl Kiiko
and poor girl Shinko become friends. This fantasy, however, culminates at the
end of the film. After the princess and peasant become friends, Shinko and
Kiiko affirm their friendship. The fantasy’s climax may reflect Shinko and
Kiiko growing closer, or that a rift between them healed. If that’s the case, the
film should have laced some doubt about their closeness, so that this capstone
could be a culmination, and not merely a confirmation of what the audience knew
from the start.

Apart from the fantasy narrative, our film’s
latter half has a baffling choice of focus. Of our sextet of childhood friends,
only Shinko and Kiiko approach roundness. That is fine. You can depict a friend
group where only the main characters have depth, and the others are just there
for background. What’s not fine is the film’s climatic conflict focusses on neither
of our heroines. The plot swivels to one of the undercooked characters in their
friend group, and his family, and his coming-of-age. This swivel is not merely
underwhelming, but infuriating. The film assumes you’re invested in this
character. You want to yell at the screen, ‘I don’t care!’

As one can expect from a nostalgic tale of
childhood, by the end, childhood dies. But the film botches this
tried-and-tested theme.

There’s a cliché that if a children’s book
has a dog on the cover, that dog will die. This symbolises the death of
innocence, or something. For such a symbol to work, however, the audience needs
to actually care about the dog. In Mai
Mai Miracle, the dog is a fish and a teacher with the same name. The
audience could not care less about them.

The children’s teacher is moving to Tokyo, because
her fiancé needs to move there. Shinko and Kiiko are ecstatic about their
teacher’s coming marriage, but she tells them to keep it a secret. Our
heroines, therefore, shower their celebrations on a pet fish named after their
teacher. In the fish’s pond, all six children leave little gifts. Kiiko’s gift,
her late mother’s perfume, leaks into the water, killing the fish. And thus
happiness turns to melancholy. Change, even positive, is bittersweet.

But it’s not bittersweet to the audience. We
don’t care about this fish, or this teacher. We know they exist, we know the
children like them, but we have no connection to these underexposed characters.
So what we have is a fish, which the audience doesn’t care about, symbolising a
teacher, who the audience doesn’t care about, to communicate the pangs of
change, which the audience doesn’t feel.

The death of innocence is also repeated in
the brooding boy, who is the focus of the third act. As I have said, the
audience builds no relationship with him, and thus feel nothing for him. His
coming-of-age affects the audience as minimally as the teacher-fish.

I cannot chalk up the film’s mediocrity to
the creators’ laziness. If the film was just lazy, perhaps I’d not be so harsh;
there would have been no promise of
something good. Just looking at the animation, flowing with the youthful
exuberance, coloured like a nostalgic daydream, we see the effort, care, and
money put into this film. The creators pooled all their talent into creating a
Ghibli-esque masterpiece. They only achieved the pretty pictures, not the
emotional depth.

Apparently Mai Mai Miracle’s getting good reviews. I would say judge it for
yourself, but the film costs around $30 American. Don’t make that gamble. Wait
for it to come on streaming. The ninety-five minutes this film steals is cost
enough.